Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Todd E Feinberg, Jon Mallatt
80 citations
Consciousness arises from standard (weak) emergence in physical systems, not from a radical or strong form of emergence. The paper traces emergent features through three progressive levels: life, nervous systems, and special neurobiological features, each increasing in complexity and ultimately leading to phenomenal consciousness. The formulation Life + Special neurobiological features → Phenomenal consciousness expresses this relationship. Consciousness fits the criteria of an emergent property with extreme complexity. The authors conclude that consciousness stems from an organism's personal life combined with a complex nervous system that maximizes emergent neurobiological features, and that no scientific explanatory gap exists between brain and consciousness, though an experiential or epistemic gap remains that is ontologically untroubling.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2019
Todd E Feinberg, Jon Mallatt
47 citations
Consciousness cannot be explained solely by physics, chemistry, and biology, creating an "explanatory gap" between the physical brain and subjective experience. This paper deduces the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identifying vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs as taxa possessing these features. It reconstructs when consciousness first evolved and considers its adaptive value. The authors theorize that consciousness arises from all complex system features of life plus even more complex features of elaborate brains. They argue the explanatory gap persists because it stems from both life and diverse brains, requiring a complex, multifactorial account including consciousness's diversity, personal nature from embodied life, and unique neural features.
EMBO Rep
March 28, 2024
David G Robinson, Jon Mallatt, Wendy Ann Peer et al.
12 citations
The cellular basis of consciousness theory claims that all cells have consciousness, but this opinion argues that the theory lacks empirical evidence to support its assertions.
Front Syst Neurosci
October 19, 2022
Louis N Irwin, Lars Chittka, Eva Jablonka et al.
11 citations
This collection of reviews, essays, and theories examines comparative animal consciousness from a biological and evolutionary perspective. Consciousness is defined as the process by which an animal has perceptual and affective experiences or feelings, arising from the material substrate of a nervous system. The work draws on a tradition of neuroscientific materialism, suggesting that consciousness is a biological phenomenon rooted in neural activity. It explores various aspects of how different animals may experience consciousness, taking an evolutionary approach to understand the origins and variations of conscious experience across species.
Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications
July 30, 2021
Jon Mallatt, Lincoln Taiz, Andreas Draguhn et al.
Some plant scientists propose that plants are cognitive and conscious, but this remains a minority view. The authors summarize arguments against plant consciousness and critique a 2020 article by Calvo, Baluska, and Trewavas that cites Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as supporting plant consciousness. The critique argues that IIT does not restrict consciousness to living organisms and can apply to nonliving systems, undermining the claim. The authors conclude that IIT cannot prove plant consciousness, for which there is no empirical evidence or support from neuron-based theories of consciousness.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
May 22, 2021
Jon Mallatt
Two theories of consciousness are compared: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Neurobiological Naturalism (NN). IIT defines consciousness as integrated information (phi-max) and claims even simple systems with interacting parts possess some consciousness. Its strengths include logical axioms, mathematical formalism, an experience-first approach, avoidance of the mind-body problem, consistency with evolution, and testable predictions. A weakness is that some logic-based reasoning was not checked against hard evidence during construction. NN incorporated evidence earlier, is less mature and less formalized, but has identified neural correlates of consciousness and offers a scientific-method roadmap for future study.